pumpkinstrokemarrow

Taking the matter a little further, I find that he has nailed his colours to the mast by making his book available as a free, 304 page pdf file from the web site of the Harvard University Press, presumably the same sort of thing as one would put on a kindle. So I march off down to the West Hill print shop with the pdf on a stick to find that they will run it off for £11.23 - same price for single and double sided. Go for single sided and I am soon clutching 2 inches of paper. The last 15 pages or so of the 304 pages are blank so that was a few pence down the drain.

Back home I discover that one can buy a pukka copy with hard covers from Amazon for £18.95 plus postage and packing, some other sorts of new copies at various prices from £9.22 and some used from £8.51. Bit of a puzzle why the Amazon site sells various different varieties of new at such widely different prices. Are the cheap ones paperbacks?

So I have spent about the same as I could have spent with Amazon. An upside is that when I have finished with the book, having opted for single sided, I have a splendid pile of paper to add to my scribbling heap, value which I would not have got from a book version. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see how easy it is to read a book in loose A4 format. Can one read such a thing in comfort, in bed?

I had not thought about the loose aspect when at the print shop, so they did not punch holes for me. So the thing to do was to drill a hole in the top left hand corner and tag the thing with a black Treasury tag (Treasury tags are colour coded for length). Clamp the block of paper between two bits of wood and go for the hole with an electric drill with a 3/16 inch bit. Clearly not intended for drilling paper as it took a bit of a push to get the bit through. Plus there was a rather unpleasant smell; the sort of burning flesh smell you get when you are having a big chunk of tooth drilled out. Whatever do they put into paper to make it do that?

All I have to do now is read the thing. A quick glance suggests that the author is very into Buddhist meditation groups which, on his own account, attract all kinds of odds and sods and which might account, in part anyway, for the snottiness of the colleague mentioned above. Real scholars don't go in for this sort of nonsense.

Moving onto scholars of a different sort, yesterday evening at the 'Shy Horse' we met a couple, the wife half of which had spent many years working at an Esher preparatory school (http://www.milbournelodge.co.uk/), the sort of place where they do common entrance, cold showers, games and Latin. This school used to be an independent with an owner headteacher, but on his retirement after some 50 years in the hot seat, the place was bought up by an educational corporation called Cognita (http://www.cognitaschools.co.uk/). I was amused to read on the latter's web site that while each of their many schools has a lot of autonomy, the head really is the head, the schools also benefit from all the support and common services which come from being part of a big group. Just the sort of argument the Old Labourites used to advance in favour of LEAs. But Blairites and Cameronites are clearly not impressed by this capitalist example. They firmly believe that head teachers should spend their days worrying about leaking roofs, pot holes in the bicycle sheds and the pay & conditions of their cleaners. Good for them to have a break from all that Latin.

I might add for connoisseurs of the shiny white plates used in most restaurants and pubs these days, that at the 'Shy Horse' they have moved onto plates which are completely unsymmetrical. To be more precise, a roughly right angled triangle with rounded corners and sides in proportion three, four and five. You get one of these if you have fish. I had meat and drew an oblong plate with sides in proportion one and three.